>>Galen: Hey guys, thanks
so much for stopping by. My name is Galen, and I'm an
Evangelist for Quixel and Epic Games. Today we're going to be
looking at an environment that I threw together
pretty quickly, using Quixel Mixer and Unreal Engine. Today we're going to be doing an
in-depth look at Quixel Mixer, and I'm going to be using a
couple of different asset types in order to achieve our final
result that you're seeing here on screen. And in case you
don't already know, everything that we're
going to be covering today is entirely free for you to use. Quixel Mixer and the
entire Megascans library are entirely free for
Unreal Engine users. All right. And without any further
delay, let's get started. All right. So let's get started
here inside Quixel Mixer. And I'm going to start by
creating the sand that you're seeing as the base for most
of what's in the environment. To start that, what
I'm going to do is just simply search
sand into the library, and see what I have
locally already. And I already have this Thai
beach skin that's actually perfect for our purposes here. And I want to make some really
simple manipulations to this before we move on. And what I'm going
to do to start is actually up the
low frequency values, because I really like what
some of the larger shapes are actually doing
here, when we actually increase that intensity. And then next thing
that I'd like to do is actually bring in maybe
some footprints into this, so that maybe it looks like
a character has maybe walked across the sand, and
water started to pool up where the footprints are. I'm going to achieve
this look by actually bringing in this snow Material. And what I really like
about this Material here is that we're actually
getting some nice footprints that we can bring in,
and maybe just isolate those individual components for
the sand Material here below. So as you can see here,
I just moved it up to the top of the stack. You can actually
see what's going on. But if I remove some of the
high frequency values here, it kind of smooths out
this surface a little bit. And it will be perfect for
isolating some of those larger trenches and foot marks. And if I bring my sand actually
to the top of the stack now, we can start to manipulate
some of the parameters here to make the sand actually
play a little bit better with the snow. And the first thing that
I'm going to do here is actually play around
with some of the values with wrap underline, and
blurring some of the underlying elements, just to see how
these two materials actually react when they're set
on top of each other. Now as you can see, as I start
to move the wrap to underlying, we actually get sort of
an average of the two, so that we're getting
the best of both of these different materials. And I think we actually
get something kind of nice right in this range. And as you can see,
as we start to play with the blur
underlying a little bit, we can start to reveal a little
bit more of the soft features from the snow
Material down below. And this is exactly
what I'm going for, in that I want the sand to have
lots of elements that are still very soft in nature, maybe like
they're a little bit windswept, but then we're going to
add in some finer details and maybe some higher frequency
values here for the next bit. And what I really like
about this Material, specifically, is
that we're actually getting some really nice high
frequency values in this scan. And I'm going to see if I can't
isolate some of those features, and get the best of both the
soft elements of what we've already created, and maybe some
the harsher, more kind of piled up areas that are a little
bit more sharp in nature. Now as you can see, I'm
wrapping this, specifically, to the underlying mix already. And from there,
what I'm going to do is just to feather the
radius a little bit, so that we get maybe a little
bit less or more of what it is that I like from the scan. And then, once again, using the
threshold to bring up a little bit more or less of the
actual Material that we need. So I like this result a lot,
but what I'm going to do now is actually bring a
Sand Actor, once again, by duplicating, hitting
control D on the keyboard, and bringing that sand Material
back to the top of the stack. Now just like in
Photoshop, you can actually append a certain layer in
Mixer to one of the elements down below. And to do that,
all I'm going to do is alt click on the Thai
beach scan that we've actually brought in here, and append
that directly to the dirt layer that we just
brought in below. Another really
cool Material type that we have in the library
is our Atlas library. And for this specific
example, what I'd like to do is actually bring
in some pebbles that might have washed into some
of the larger footprints that we've got for our Material. And our Atlases are obviously
a different asset type in that they actually have
opacity attached to them. And as we've just isolated
the albedo channel here, you can see that we have
these really nice pebbles that are just sitting on the top. Now just to reinforce
the point that I was just making about how
Mixer's always tiling, I'll just manipulate x
and y on this Material so you can see just what
happens in the viewport as we start to slide
this Material around. A lot of the Atlases
in the library specifically have this
tiling feature with them, which is really nice
for just sprinkling on the top of the surface
just like this one. And the first thing
I'm going to do is actually manipulate
the albedo here slightly so that we get the
color into a range that I think fits a little
bit better for our purposes. Now there's a couple
of different ways that you can manipulate color. And I'm going to start here by
middle clicking on the color swatch. And what that
actually does is it creates an average of all the
colors from the mix down below. And just like that, we have
these pebbles actually blending in much better with the
surface, as you can see. And another way to
do this is actually by using the eyedropper tool. And when you select
that color swatch, you can drag into the
viewport here, and actually select any range
of colors that you can see inside of your project. And as always, you can use
the color picker if you like, or punch in hex values to
get the desired result. Now the next thing
that I'm going to do is actually change
the blending mode to where we actually get these
pebbles to blend from below. Now as you can see,
as we start to feather the threshold of
this, you can see that the pebbles are
now only coming through in those recessed areas. And I really like this
result, because it gives us a little bit of visual
rests on the surface where we have elements of the Material
that are very, very devoid of detail, and then some that
are very rich down below. And since our subject is
a beach here, why don't we add in a little bit of
noise onto the surface to where we can actually get a
little bit of undulation that might be present in an area
like this specifically. And, again, this is always
tiling, but as you can see, I'm just adjusting the
frequency, and maybe the amplitude, a little
bit to try to get something that I think is a little bit
more in line with the reference that I've pulled for
this environment. And I think I'm pretty
happy with this result here. So I think the last
thing we need to do is just bring in some
simple puddles into the mix. And if I did click
the liquid button here at the top of the
UI, I can bring in this liquid Actor, which will
add in some really nice puddles for this mix. Now I'm pretty happy with the
end result here, just as is, but it's important to note
that you can go in and start to affect maybe the
threshold of the moisture, maybe make the moisture
look a little bit deeper, or blur the effect in the
sliders on the side here. All right. I think I'm pretty happy
with this mix as it is here. So why don't we go in and save
our projects really quick. And the next thing
that I would like to do is actually add
this to the library. Now there's several
ways you can go about exporting out of Mixer. But this is my method of
choice whenever I'm bringing an asset into Unreal Engine. Whenever I click the Export
to Library button, what this is doing is, in
a non-destructive way, it's bringing in all
of the information that we just
created in this mix. And we can actually scale
this to go up and down the resolution from
export out of Bridge. Or we can customize it even
further with some channel packing, either here in
the mixer UI, or in Bridge when we get over there. Now since I know I don't have
any metalness or specular that I need for this
project specifically, I'm going to uncheck those,
and just click export. And we'll put a pin in this,
but we'll come back to it here in a second, when we
actually jump over to Bridge And now the other
important Actor that we want to
start to work on is the chest that's in the center
of the environment here. Now one of the big updates that
we've made a Quixel Mixer 2020 is that we've actually
added in 3D support. Now what this allows
you to do is not only leverage the entire
Megascans library to retexture and
repurpose assets, but you can also bring in
custom assets if you would like. Now to start, I'm just going to
browse over to my local library and find the Small Wooden Chest
Actor here from the library. And I really like
this Actor a lot, because I thought
that I could maybe make some very simple
manipulations to it, and actually tell a pretty
convincing story, just on this small
little beach scene. Now to make it feel
a little bit more weathered and part
of this world, I think what I'd
like to do is start to make some really simple
manipulations in order to actually get this to seem
like it's actually been sitting on the beach for
a long time, maybe it's accumulated some barnacles,
and some moss buildup. So why don't we start
now by actually going up to adding in a surface. And if I go into start
here, what I'll bring in is actually that exact
same sand Material that we were just working
with on our surface mix. And what I'd like to
start with is actually is maybe bringing
some of this sand into some of the cracks and
crevices of this object, as if it's been windblown,
or maybe sitting on the beach for a long time. Now in projecting
these materials onto the surface,
what I'd like to do is actually leverage the
hexaplanar projection, which is brand new inside of Mixer 2020. And by selecting
box projection, I have a couple
different things that I can do to manipulate
this Material, and get it into the range that
I'm looking for this project. Now, I really want this effect
to be rather understated, so I only want the sand
to be maybe collecting in some of the cracks and
crevices of this object. So after I brought
in the sand, I can right click
on that Material, and actually add in
a mask component. And we're going to be selecting
curvature for this example, because the live curvature
component in Mixer is really powerful. Now you're given a couple
of different options, if you want to use
default curvature or use some the presets down below,
like edges only or cavities, but why don't we start
to mess around this, and just generally see if we
can bring it into the range that I'm looking for. The levels adjustments
is really important here for dialing in the
result, and then I can actually go in and affect
the tightness of this, as well. Now there's also anti-aliasing
and soft mesh options here down below, or I can invert
the effect, as well. But what this does
is really just allow you to customize the
experience even further. I really like the way this
anti-aliasing actually looks on the surface,
because it kind of despeckles the curvature a
little bit, and it makes it just feel a little bit
more natural on the surface. And like I mentioned,
we can go back up to maybe default curvature,
and start to maybe just adjust the levels and the tightness to
get a custom result here just by using the default settings. Now I think this is
looking pretty good. But as you can see, we're
getting a very uniform result across this entire surface. So why don't we
actually bring in a map to actually go in and
break this up a little bit. So I'll go up to
the top of my stack, and add in a map component
to this specific stack. Now what's really
nice about this is that I can use this
map to actually break up the effects from down below. And we have blending
modes on top of that that will allow us
to really customize this. So I want to leverage another
component of the library in the imperfections section. And if I go over to
my local library, and actually just isolate
the Imperfections tab, you can see that we
have a wide variety of different imperfection
maps that are perfect for what it is I'm trying to do. And these imperfections
can do a wide variety of different things
for your mix, but what I'm going
to be doing here is actually using it to break
up the sand a little bit, and then multiplying the effect
on top of the stack down below. Now as you can see, we get this. And I'll just toggle on
and off, so you can see exactly what the result does. But I think that
we've got something that feels a little bit
more natural than what we had before. Let's continue to weather the
surface a little bit more. And like we touched
on in the last part, we can actually go
into our Atlas section here, and find some really
interesting components for this mix, specifically. I'd really like a nice buildup
of some lichens or moss, and then actually bring in
some barnacles here, as well. So let's start with the
moss, and what I'll do is actually just apply this
directly to our project, and see the result. Now once again, we
can project this in a couple different
ways, but I'm going to stick with the
hexaplanar projections to make sure that we tackle
some of our seams problems here, and just start
to maybe move it around a little
bit with our wheel, and start to actually manipulate
the surface a little bit more. And like we touched
on before, I'm going to be using hexaplanar
projections, specifically, with this example, because
I really want to cover up the seams with the effect. And the last thing
I'm going to do here is actually just make it so that
we project exactly the details that I want on the surface,
exactly where I want them, with this wheel. And once again, I
don't want this to be a completely uniform effect. So what I'm going
to do is actually add in a position gradient
now into my mask stack. And the reason for this
is because I kind of like the lichens that not be on
the top side of the surface, because it seems like
you would probably only get this type of effect in
an area that might be covered in shade, or an area that's
getting a lot less sunshine. So when do we start over here
with the position gradient. And as you can see,
as we start to feather the range a little bit,
we can get that effect to start to have a
really nice creep up the side of the surface. And then going back into the
Material properties here, I can actually start
to mess around with whether or not the
effect is going to blur the details down below. And I think that what
we can do is actually turn that all the way
up, so that we actually get this lichen to actually
seem like it's really coming off the surface a little bit more. And the next thing
I'd like to add in, like I mentioned at the
beginning, are some barnacles. I think the barnacles
are going to give us a really nice aged
look to this, and it's going to break up the
surface a little bit more than what we have right now. And what's really
cool about this is that when you start to
mess around with the frequency values of these
different materials, you might really
surprise yourself with what you're actually
going to get in the way that these materials start
to react to one another. And the next thing
that I'd like to do is actually mask out a
little bit of the barnacles on the front side of the box. And the reason for that is
because I got some feedback from one of my
colleagues about how the barnacles on the
front side of the box were actually just a little bit
too distracting when I sent him an early version of this scene. So by just adding in this
normal component to the side here, what I can
do is actually use a specific axis to
mask out the effect. And once again, manipulating
the range and the middle section of the wheel actually gives
you a very different effect. So definitely start to
mess around with those different parameters,
until you get something that you think you really like. All right. So I'm pretty happy with how
the barnacles turned out here, so I think what I'm going
to do is actually go back to the moss, and
what I'd like to do is break up the effect
a little bit more than what we've done already. And to start what
I'm going to do is actually just duplicate
this layer by hitting control D on the keyboard. And by duplicating
it here, we actually carry over all the different
parameters and the information that we stored inside of the
stack, as well as the Material itself, so we don't
have to go back through and punch all those
values back in again. Now what I'd like to
do is actually just change a couple basic
parameters here, so that we get the
moss to project a little bit differently
on the surface with a different albedo. And what this does is
actually creates a little bit of separation between
the two moss materials that we have on the surface. And because we have 3D
painting in the viewport here, what we'll do is
actually go in and start to mask out the areas
where I actually don't like the effect at all. And this is really
easy to add in just by right clicking
on any Material you have in your project, and
selecting the paint mask component. And the paint mask actually
integrates with your stack, but isn't a part of
the stack necessarily. So as you can see
here, I'm going to start to paint out the
effect a little bit of that moss in the areas where I
just didn't like it simply in the projection. All right. I think I'm pretty
happy with this box, so why don't we move
on to the next asset. All right. So let's move on to creating
the rocks for this scene. And just to keep
everything consistent, I'm going to actually pull
another asset from the Thailand scan trip in these rocks
that you're seeing here. So what I'm going to do to
start is actually bring in, once again, that position
gradient component that we were looking
at in the last example. And what I want
is for these sands to just be creeping up
the sides of these rocks, and really just kind
of fall onto the skirt, and then in some of the
areas, where we're actually getting some recesses
and crevices in the rock, and also cover the
skirt as best as we can, so that it actually
integrates a lot better with the component of the
sands mix that we made earlier. And then next thing
I'm going to do is actually bring in
some procedural noise, because I think the effect is
good as it currently exists, but I want to break up that
mask a little bit more, so we get a little bit more
of a natural transition with the sand. Now there's two issues that
pop up immediately when we start to look at this Perlin
Noise Actor in our scene. So what I'm going to
do here to start is, actually, try to get this noise
to interact with the position gradient that we have in
the stack elements below. And to do that,
what I'm going to do is actually just use
an overlay blend mode, so that we get the position
gradient as well as the noise from what we just created. And the second
problem that you'll see when we brought this Perlin
noise component into our scene is that we're actually
not getting this to tile. And one of the ways you
can actually combat this is if you bring in a projection
component into our stack, and we append it
just to that noise. So I think this is looking
really good so far, but I think we can push it
even further by actually bringing in another
curvature component here, and actually just
having the sand adhere to the cracks and
crevices of this rock now. So as you can see,
now what we're getting is a really nice soft transition
of the sand creeping up the side of the
rock, and adhering to some of the cracks and
crevices in the rock surface. And, of course, this is entirely
non-destructive, so at any time we can go back in and
start to maybe adjust how far that sand creeps
up the side of the rock, or maybe go in and
start to affect the frequency of the
noise on the surface. So there's two more things
I want to add into this mix, specifically. So what I'll do is
actually go up to, once again, the Atlas
section of the library. And I'm going to bring
in two different elements that I think will really
tie this thing together. Now I'm going to start with
that exact same pebbles Material that we're working with on the
surface mix, because I want that to stay consistent
from what we had on the first mix in the
terrain, and actually bring in that same
effect here on the rock, so that when we
start to actually jam this rock into the surface, that
we have similar components that maybe make this integrate just
a little bit more into our scene. So, once again, I'm just going
to be using a position gradient so that we only get the
rocks to adhere just to that skirt element here. And then I'm going to adjust
the color a little bit here, so that we get
something that's a little bit more natural for our mix. And I think this is
looking pretty good. Now there's one other thing
I want to add into this mix, and I think it'd be really cool
if we had some seaweed that maybe gotten caught in some
of the rocks here on the side. So what I'll do is I'll go
back up to my Atlas tab, and bring in a
seaweed Actor here, where we can actually start
to scatter this effect on top of the surface. Now this is kind of
a low tech solution, but if I change the
projection method to tiling, what will
happen is that, since all the different UV
shells are actually rotated in their own way, in
0 to 1 space, what will happen is that this effect of putting
this Atlas on the surface will make it seem
like it's randomize or rotated across the
surface, when we actually start to repeat this
effect several times. Now as you can
see, we're starting to get seaweed to now project
across the surface in a pretty cool way. And if I start to
manipulate this in x and y, we can start to
actually get the effect to be exactly where we want it
to be projected on the surface. Now this is looking pretty cool. But as you can see, once I
change it to blend from below, we can actually get some
lost and found lines with this, which is really makes
it down that more convincing in the mix. And just because we
can, why don't we go in and start to paint
out some of the areas where the seams are
very present with this. So I'll go into this area,
specifically, and paint out where I'm seeing those two
different pieces of seaweed, maybe just intersect that a
seam in an unfortunate way. And just like that,
we've got seaweed tiling across our
surface, and it's looking really, really cool. So why don't I go ahead and
save my project, and then we'll move on to the next element. All right. So let's see one last mix here
before we jump into the Engine. And what I'm going
to do to start here is actually bring in this coin. And what I'd like is
actually to scatter this coin across the surface of the
sand, because adding in some 3D scatter actually
will just create even more unique
shadows, and just break up the surface even more. So why don't we start by
just bringing it into Mixer. And I'm going to use gold
as my starting place. Now as you can see,
the gold itself is just a little bit too
strong, a little bit too clean, for what we're doing here. So what I'm going to do
is actually, first of all, break up the
roughness by bringing in another imperfection
and just overlaying that in the roughness channel. Now this is, obviously,
a very subtle effect, but I think it's enough to break
up the surface here for us. And now I'm going to bring in
a dust and dirt texture, which I think would be really,
really nice just to break up the gold a little bit. So I'll bring in this
sand debris Material. Now after I adjust the scale
on this, what I'm going to do is just bring it
into the range that I need it to be for
the albedo, and then use a curvature mask
component to mask the effect a little bit. Now as you can see,
this dirt really breaks up the surface
in a nice way. And what I really
like about this is that we're able to maybe
put some sand or dirt here in the areas where it might
be collecting on this, but it's also kind of dulling
the effect of the very, very shiny gold. So it's kind of getting both
of those effects for us in one. So once again, this is
just a really simple mix. But I think it's good enough
for a ground scatter element. Now one thing I want to point
out here before we move on is that there are a
couple of different ways to export out of Mixer. And like we did
with our surface, you can go File, and Add to
Library for a surface mix. And then if you need to
export anything that's going to be related
to a 3D object, you go to our Export
tab here on the side, and this will actually allow you
to channel pack and customize the export experience fully. I do want to point out
that we are actively working to have
an Add To library component for 3D elements. But as of the recording
of this video, that feature is not
currently represented. So for all of those 3D
mixes that we just did, I'm going to go and export those
just as JPGs into my scene. But for now I'm going
to jump over to Bridge, and I want to show
you the surface mix that we made at the very
beginning of the tutorial. If I go to my local tab,
and I browse down to mixer, you can see here on the side
that we have the sandy feet mix that we were just working on. And I can isolate my different
maps here on the side, or I can go into my 3D
viewer, and actually preview the Material here
live inside of Bridge. And, again, what's
really nice about this is that this is a completely
non-destructive workflow, in that, I can actually export
this at whatever resolution I like out of Bridge,
channel pack it, and really customize
the experience exactly for what my project needs. So as you can see with
just a single click, I was able to get that Material
that I created in Mixer, and export it from
Bridge with the Material already set up in my scene. And let's just inspect
the Master Material here real quick so you can see just
how simple this Material really is. So one of the things I'd
like to point out here before we move on is that if
you're using a custom master Material for your
project, you can actually have the plugin point
to that Master Material, so that a Material instance
gets created from that mater Material as opposed to the
standard Master Material that ships with Bridge. We know that every
project has its own needs, so we wanted to make
the tool as flexible as possible for artists. So as you can see on the
side of my Details tab, I've a really simple
setup for this scene. And I've brought in the
new sky and atmosphere systems and a couple
lights, so that we can start to build our scene
directly from this setup. So to start, I've already
dragged on the Material here to our Ground Actor. And from here, let's
start to actually make some manipulations to
this Material instance, so that we can start to get
that landscape looking exactly the way we want it
in the viewport. You can do some really
simple modifications with this Material,
like affecting the tiling for the
Material, or maybe making a simple adjustment
to the albedo, maybe tint it in a specific
way, or feather the roughness a little bit to where you
get all the reflections to be exactly the way you
want them in your scene. And I'm also adjusting
the normal intensity to be a little
bit higher than 1, because I want some of
those crispy details to come out from the
mix that we created. And since we exported
with displacement for this specific mix, I'm going
to start to actually change the tessellation
values, and affect the displacement strength, until
we get something that we really like in the view. We've made it here, as well,
so where you can actually adjust the amount
of tessellation, be it near or far
to the camera, which is just a really nice
feature for optimization. So now that we've got a really
solid foundation to build on, why don't we start to bring
in some of the 3D elements that we were just
mixing into our scene. And let's start
with our rocks here. So what I'm going to do
is actually bring in LOD 0 as the render mesh, but also
have a couple different LODs in my scene here,
just to make sure that we're staying performant. So now as you can see,
with just a single click, we're able to bring
in this Actor, and start to set dress our
scene with exactly what it was that we were just mixing. And just for the
sake of expediency, I've also exported the
Material from Mixer, so that we get the updates to
the mix for this specific rock. And like we touched on at the
very beginning of the video, I really wanted the integration
from this rock to the sand to actually be a
little bit more custom, so I've added in a really
simple dither setup to this, so that we actually get a little
bit of a blend from that rock down into the Terrain Actor. So this is the math
that plugs directly into pixel depth offset. It's nothing fancy,
but I think it'll get the job done for
what we're doing. And as you can see here,
we're getting a really nice transition there, where we're
getting some of the sand from the mix playing
really, really nice with what we're getting
with the sand in the rock. And now I'm just going to
be doing a little bit of set dressing here to
try to get something compelling in the frame. So I'll start to
duplicate these guys, rotate them around, and try
to find something compelling. And let's go ahead and
bring in our box now. And this is kind of our
Hero Actor for this scene. So why don't we place it a
little bit off to the side here, maybe just to the
right side of the frame. And we'll offset it
a little bit so it seems like it might be sitting
in that sand a little bit. So one thing that I
added to the shader, just because I wanted a
little bit more flexibility, was actually adding in
a desaturation feature into the shader. And this isn't
anything too fancy. All I'm really doing is bringing
in just a simple desaturation node, and multiplying
that with a constant, so that when I'm in my
Material instance, then I can actually affect that
a little bit more or less, depending on what it
is I'm trying to get. So I want to do
a little bit more set dressing here,
as well, because I want to break up some
of the horizontal lines, and maybe make some more
elements that just kind of sit in the sand, make it feel
a little bit more grounded. So as you can see, I'm
just cloning this guy, rotating it slightly,
trying to find some compelling angles for it. And what this does is it
really just sort of breaks up the surface even
more from what we had. And I'm, specifically, doing
this because of some feedback that I received from
one of my colleagues that breaking up some of
the lines in this scene would actually go
a long way to make it feel that much more organic. I also wanted a little bit
of movement in the scene, so I brought in some
palm fronds that are just going to be moving
slightly in the background. But let's go out and
move into our last step of this scene here,
too, where I'm going to start to scatter
in some of the elements that we had in Mixer. So the two pieces that I
want to scatter in this scene are this coin that
we mixed that's kind of a nice gold coin,
and also this little pebble. And I wanted to bring these
guys in as actual 3D objects to scatter on the surface,
because I thought it would just look a little bit better than
relying on the displacement to actually create
some of these shapes. And as you can see,
as I just start to sprinkle in these gold coins
and some of these pebbles, it just makes it feel
a little bit more grounded than what
we had before. And just sprinkling
in these coins adds in a little bit of a
narrative component, which I really like. So I'm going to go in and
scatter a little bit of those into our scene. But I think that will about
tie it up for this environment. Thank you, guys, so much
for watching this video. If you have any
questions or comments, definitely feel free to
leave them down below. And if you haven't
already, definitely make sure to check out some
of the other videos that are coming out of Unreal Fest
here on the Unreal Engine YouTube channel. Once again, thank you
so much for watching. And we'll catch you
in the next one.
